Subject: Chess History on the Web (2001 no.7) Date: 1 Apr 2001 09:47:50 -0000 From: "World Chess Championship" Site review - Player collections II This short review will wrap up our look at Web game collections for individual players. It's the continuation of... Karpov Chess History on the Web (2001 no.5) http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw01c01/karpov.htm ...where I built a collection for Karpov's career up to and including his first match with Kasparov (1984-85). The new collection starts with Karpov's victory in the 1985 OHRA tournament in Amsterdam, and ends with the 8th round of the 2001 Melody Amber tournament in Monaco. I started with 1664 games from the UPITT collection, removed 264 duplicate or nonsense games, and added 225 games from The Week in Chess or other sources. After creating an index page, I uploaded the index and games to... http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw01d01/karpov.htm ...The 1159 games from the first Karpov collection plus the 1625 games from this collection add up to 2784 games for Karpov. This is less than the 3079 games in the UPITT collection with which I started, because duplicates have been removed. The new collection still needs work on the game headers, but the index is in good shape. --- To conclude this series of articles on player collections, I'd like to look again at some of the material that I've released in the past few months. The first in the series was... Kasparov (Chess History on the Web 2000 no.20) http://members.tripod.com/~Mark_Weeks/chw00j15/kasparov.htm ...which I built during Kasparov's title match with Kramnik. The feedback I received was positive and encouraging. One expert collector has sent me hundreds of Kasparov games which were missing from my original collection. Because of this new material, the original collection of 1530 games has grown to 2163 games from 246 events. This experience supports my opinion that the Web is a wonderful medium for collaborative effort. I could never have foreseen who would discover the collections and what contributions might be made. It's always useful to get a second opinion & some discussion points arose. Unfortunately, some games exist only in fragments. The opening moves of a game may be lost, but a later position plus subsequent moves survive in the literature. My initial decision to ignore them was wrong. The bulk of the new additions to the Kasparov collection are from simultaneous exhibitions against weaker opponents. On the positive side, most chess historians would agree that these games are pieces of a player's career worth discovering and preserving. On the negative side, most players would agree that few of these games are worth studying; some of them are simply awful. It is often hard to determine whether these games are even genuine. For digital collections, my opinion now is that exhibition games should be kept separate from serious games against grandmaster competition. This satisfies the requirements of both the historian and the player. The collections can always be combined if necessary. The second collection was... Kramnik (2000 no.21) http://members.tripod.com/~Mark_Weeks/chw00k01/kramnik.htm ...which I created when it became likely that Kramnik would beat Kasparov. The original collection of 1130 games has grown to 1241 covering 146 events. Most of the additional material is from events organized after the match against Kasparov. The Staunton collection discussed in... Staunton (2000 no.23) http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw00l01/staunton.htm ...was created when I couldn't locate another PGN collection covering Staunton. At the time I wrote the review, I was unhappy about Staunton's treatment by historians. Since then, by sheer coincidence, Richard Forster's Late Knight column in the Chess Cafe (www.chesscafe.com) has twice dealt with Staunton's playing style. If you haven't seen 'Staunton, the Chess Player' (Jan 2001) & 'Staunton, a Master of Opening Preparation' (Mar 2001), both columns are worth a look. The fourth collection was... Anand (2001 no.1) http://Mark_Weeks.tripod.com/chw01a01/anand.htm ...which I created after Anand's victory in the latest FIDE knockout competition. This collection has grown from 1383 games to 1486 games in 154 events. The additional games came from comparing another large Anand collection with the material found in UPITT. I'll continue to work on improving these collections and on creating new ones, but I don't intend to devote entire 'Chess History on the Web' articles to them. Instead, for the next few issues, I'm going to look at some chess history sites which haven't been reviewed in my previous articles. I hope that these sites interest you as much as they interest me! Bye for now, Mark Weeks